Anti-racism protesters stand outside the Richmond town hall to defend the Yarra council from far-right protesters on 17 October 2017.
Photograph: Luis Enrique Ascui/AAP

I teach undergraduates at Western Sydney University, several hundreds of whom have, over the last five years, studied my unit, “The Racial State”. I chose this title to echo the seminal book of the same name by race critical scholar, David Theo Goldberg.

My students have no problem identifying racism; many of them live at its coalface. I am told countless stories about family members changing their names from Mohamed to say, Michael, in order to get a job. “Driving while Muslim” is a particularly relatable experience for many of my students, as is being asked “where are you really from?” Many have or know of stories of police harassment and racial profiling.

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Unlike my colleagues at many other universities in Australia, the existence of racism as a lived experience is not up for debate in my teaching. However, how racism relates to race is something that students have a harder time understanding, as do most of the rest of us. This is understandable; neither school nor society equips us with the “racial literacy” that we all need as members of a society built on the dispossession of its original owners and home to large numbers of racialised migrants.

At least part of the reason for why there is such denial, hindering the acknowledgement and redress of racism, is our lack of understanding of the link between racism and race. The predominant position, well argued for example by Barbara and Karen Fields, is that the “fiction” of race is produced by racism. The Fields’ position is a nuanced one; they argue forcefully that racism is not “an attitude or a state of mind, like bigotry: it’s an action.”

However well formulated this is, it nevertheless belies the fact that the term “racism” was first used only in the early 20th century. The first book published on the subject was written by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1938, as Nora Räthzel explains. Hirschfeld coined the term to refute the hierarchical division of humanity into “races”, the theory known as “scientific racism” which originated in the 19th century. While it was certainly necessary to deny the scientific validity of this idea in the strongest terms, the formulation “racism” did little to dislodge the structural conditions established under the rubric of race.

As the political theorist, Barnor Hesse, explains, the idea of race is fundamentally about the creation of a division between Europeans and non-Europeans, both internally, beginning with the Spanish expulsion or forced conversion of Jews and Muslims, and externally within systems of colonial rule, and of course in the transatlantic slave trade across the Americas. Race thus predates and is continuous with racial science and eugenicism.

Ideas of race are used to justify the domination and exploitation of populations who, historically, either stood in the way of European colonisation (Aboriginal people, the native people of the Americas), who were exploited for the advancement of European capitalism (enslaved African people), or who challenged the tenets of Euro-Christianity (Jews, Muslims). Above all, it is developed by white Europeans with the principal aim of maintaining their supremacy. Thus, the terms of reference can be extended and retracted. No better example of this exists than the White Australia policy and its later revocation, not primarily because of the immorality of its existence, but because of the demographic demands pressing down on Australia as an economic actor. The contract between new migrants and the Australian nation-state is founded upon a tacit agreement to “become white” by adhering to the primary colonial purpose of Australia to replace Aboriginal ownership and autonomy over the land, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues.

The identification of racism – the suffix ‘ism’ implying an ideology – allows us to make the persistence of racial systems invisible and to prioritise intentions over actions. The unique association of “racism” with only one chapter in the evolution of the many-headed hydra of race – 19th century “scientific racism” – makes it easy for us to deny that we are racist. No clearer can this be seen than in the context of contemporary Islamophobia with even those who advocate for a Muslim ban claiming “non-racism” because “Islam is not a race”. Being alert to race – not as identity or as a measure on an abhorrent phrenological chart – but as a central facet of modern European and, by extension, colonial systems of rule, helps us see just how obfuscating this claim is.

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Even the Alt-Right, whose members marched on Charlottesville in August, murdering antifascist activist, Heather Heyer, deny being racist. They claim their argument for “white separatism” merely recognises the natural division of the world into ethnically-bounded states. The claim that the US or Australia, both countries founded on theft from their original inhabitants, could be for whites only reveals the racial supremacy on which the Alt Right claims are based. Nevertheless, the narrow interpretation of racism we have been endowed with is at least partly responsible for allowing them to argue the contrary. We all need better racial literacy if we are to face the challenge ahead.

Alana Lentin is professor of cultural and social analysis at Western Sydney University